Thinking Class

#084 - Mark Walsh - Why Western Man Is Under Attack: On Nature, Masculinity And Nation

• John Gillam

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Mark Walsh is a teacher of embodiment, trauma, education, and resilience. He is the author of Embodiment: Working with the Body in Training and Coaching and Embodied Meditation. Mark also hosts the Embodiment Podcast, which has been downloaded over two million times, and was the founder of the Embodiment Conference, which brought together over 1,000 teachers and half a million participants.

In this conversation, Mark and I think out loud about the importance of embodiment, connection, and community in modern life, how modernity leads us to disembodied lives, why we should reconnect to our spiritual nature, why we need to foster healthy relationships to thrive, how cultural dislocation threatens Western societies, what the challenges faced by men are today, the impact of modernity's cultural disconnection from nature and community, the practical steps people can take to reconnect with life, the importance of physicality, nature, what the role of men in society is and much much more.

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SPEAKER_00

Hello, classmate, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillum, and today I'm speaking with Mark Walsh. Mark teaches embodiment, trauma education, and resilience. He is also the author of Embodiment, working with the body in training and coaching and embodied meditation. Mark hosts the Embodiment Podcast, which has been downloaded over two million times and has led the embodiment conference, which saw 1,000 teachers and 500,000 delegates attend. In this conversation, Mark and I think out loud about the importance of embodiment, connection, and community in modern life, and how modernity has led us to lead disembodied lives and why that's a problem, why we should reconnect to our spiritual nature, and why we need to foster healthy relationships to thrive, what the challenges faced by men are today, the impact of modernity's cultural disconnection from nature and community, the practical steps people can take to reconnect with life, the importance of physicality, nature, and what the role of men in society is, and much, much more. As you'll hear, Mark is passionate and indeed very fired up about the problems facing men in modernity, but modernity more broadly, you'll hear that he believes society has been governed so badly that it is no wonder that men are checking out and that there is the threat of conflict within the country of Britain and in Western European countries more broadly, owing to what he sees as a political class that has suppressed national sentiment, community, and masculinity while promoting multiculturalism and suggesting all masculinity is toxic in its nature. You might not agree with that, and that's fine, but this is an increasingly common sentiment being felt by people within Western nations. Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform and Substack, where paid subscribers get the opportunity to contribute questions to a special QA to my guests that only you will get access to. Let's grow Thinking Class together. Enjoy the show, classmates. Mark Walsh, welcome to Thinking Class.

SPEAKER_01

Thanks so much for joining me. It's an honor to be here, given some of your guests. I was uh extremely happy to see this in my diary this morning.

SPEAKER_00

Well, thank you. Thank you to your assistant Vish for putting us together. It's uh something that we can thank serendipity for, or at least Vish's good taste. Uh and I'll I'll take that as a as a compliment.

SPEAKER_01

Everyone deserves a slightly autistic half-German woman in charge of their life. Okay. She's my assistant, and I'm very, very lucky.

SPEAKER_00

Mark, I think by way of a primer before we get into some of the topics of your new book, How to Become Human, uh, it would be good to explain a little bit about what it is you do for a living. So you teach embodiment, you teach trauma education, and also you have this theme of anti-decadence that runs throughout your work. Perhaps we could unpack each of those terms and why it is that you found them to be important to work upon with people.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. I mean, I I have a bizarre, silly modern job, right? My mum still doesn't know what I do for a living, and and that's fine. So I spend most of my time teaching coaches. I'm a specialist in something called embodiment. It just means how to get in your body, very similar to mindfulness, if people have heard of that, um, comes from the martial arts, body therapy, different traditions like yoga dance meditation that I'm uh fairly well trained in. Um I apply that in different areas. So I've worked in the business world with that. Um, I supervise a charity um in Ukraine doing work with traumas. That's the sort of sharp end of that, if you will. Much more intense than working with, you know, business people on stress or something like that. Uh yeah, I run a podcast around that, written books around that. And um, anti-decadence is just as a sort of leaned right. Uh, as one starts paying more tax and getting older, that tends to happen. And I started to realize maybe the hippies didn't have the uh monopoly on psychological well-being.

SPEAKER_00

Well, maybe we can uh get a little bit more into why it is you think it is important to work with people to get them back into the body. So what what is it that that made you go in that direction that you thought this is something I need to do as part of my life's work?

SPEAKER_01

Sure. Um I've essentially come to the conclusion after a whole life of looking at what keeps people sane, what makes people well, is we need four connections. And I call this a tetrarchy model, you know, from the sort of classy Roman uh rule of four, uh that my Greek friend says Greek originally. So it's connecting to the body, connecting to community, connecting to ecology, and connecting to spirituality. And these things almost define what it is to be well. Uh, trauma is a split from those four things. And if someone were to be an effective leader or you know, a happy person, this is just necessary. Um, the body was where I started. I think my story is very much analogous to that of uh Western culture or modernity. When I was young, I was extremely cerebral. My parents were teachers. I read all the books in the library, literally all of them. I was told I have an IQ in the top 0.01%. And everyone told me I was very clever. School was very easy for me. Less so the discipline side of school, but the you know, the exams, I just was found very straightforward. Um, and I actually got to my teenage years and was miserable. I was suicidally depressed, alcohol addicted by 17. My first relationships were a disaster. Um, and I realized like, oh, hang on a minute, if I'm so clever, why am I not flourishing? Is now what I'd now say. Why am I failing so badly? And why am I so unhappy? And I was really unhappy as a person and was not doing, you know, not doing very well at all. Um, to the point where you know you wouldn't have necessarily put bets on me surviving to full adulthood. Um so I started to go, well, hang on, there must be something else. Now, very luckily, um, my mum used to be a nun for seven years, actually, before my ledge of a dad disrobed her. Apparently, there was a few months. There was a few months in between those phenomena, I'm told, just for the just for the virtue of my mother and father here. But she was she was a novice nun, and the maximum you could do for seven years. So she was a very spiritual woman, and she'd uh I'd sort of been brought up essentially sort of mystical Catholic. So all religions have a sort of inner and outer sense, and I was very much brought up in the sort of inner sense of that, like the Sufi tradition of Islam would be an equivalence. Um, but at 15, she sort of saw that it wasn't going very well. And she we didn't have much money, but she paid for me to go to Israel with some Jewish friends, and that was sort of mind-blowing for me at 15. You know, being in uh Muk David and have someone put their Uzi on the table next to you and seeing all these sort of religious sites. It was a big experience for me. And at 16, she lost her job and got a bunch of money. Um, for the first time in her life, we were able to have a holiday outside of the UK, and she took me to India and Nepal. She basically realized, like, okay, Christianity is not working for this kid. He needs something else. And that was the beginning of my journey. At 18, I discovered martial arts, Japanese martial arts in particular. That was my life for many years. I was a live-in uh martial arts student, which is quite unusual in the UK. I did that around the world. Uh, and then gradually, you know, this sort of body-mind practices uh that lead, you know, they're very effective, that are essentially character building. So the Japanese idea is a dough, like you've heard of Aikido, judo, karate dough. So this means a way of developing the self. And there's an analogous Greek idea. The gymnasia was originally this idea. Uh, certainly British sports were all invented in public schools with this in mind. And I really delved into that, and that became my career, my life. I started teaching. At a certain point, um, I was drawn to the sharp end of things. I've worked in about six different war zones. At another point, I bought my first cheap suit from Marks and Spencer's and thought maybe I could make some more money working in business. So I had that experience. And uh, yeah, that's been my life. So here we are today.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, I'd seen I'd seen your LinkedIn profile and that you'd done some time in the corporate world. And I well, I I think that's probably a place that we can delve into a bit more as to uh a life that is very much disembodied. Uh I think there was probably a time pre-computers that if you looked at the life, say, uh in the city of London of a trader, there's probably lots of relationship building, coffees and beers, and people thought it was very decadent perhaps. But the reality is, is people knew their stuff, they spoke actually with flesh and blood people, they were using their judgment. And yeah, I'm sure there was a cerebral aspect to it, but they were actually engaging with the world around them and the people in them. And now, and I can say this from experience as someone who sits here hunched over a laptop most of the day, uh getting assailed by emails and instant messages, and now everyone is absolutely obsessed with the new golden calf of AI, which just outsources our decision making and our judgment even more than it really was. Yeah, we can talk about that. Yeah, we absolutely should. Um, and and then we close our laptop lids. And unless we've got a gym membership or bothered to get ourselves out on a run or on the bike or something, is we'll find ourselves then scrolling on our phones, messaging our friends, and almost the whole of our lives have become disembodied. You find yourself living in not just your own head, but an algorithmic world which you have little agency around actually um uh engaging with, I suppose. So uh perhaps we can get into the kinds of people that come to you for help, Mark. Is there is there a do you find corporate bobs like me, or do you find uh others coming to you for other reasons? Is there a category of people that come?

SPEAKER_01

I think they used to be. I think what's happened now is I was a sort of early adopter of this. Um, coming from a background of personal trauma, coming from a background of addiction, those kind of tendencies, I very much needed this stuff to stay sane. Um my head is not always a great place to be. Um, and if I don't get into my body regularly, if I don't connect to spirituality and ecology regularly, um I'm not well. And that's really important. You know, lots of members of my family have mental illness and they're very troubled. There's been lots of suicides. And, you know, for me, it's a matter of, you know, I'm I feel great today. Like I had a great morning practicing what I teach. And um, you know, as a result, I'm thriving. Uh so for me it's essential, but what's happened over the last sort of 10, 20 years where I've been teaching this material is it's become less weird and more necessary. It's like the normies have caught up. So the average guy working in the City of London, you know, now is like way more wired than he was in the past, way more anxious, way more stressed. There isn't those very human interactions so much that you talked about, like, you know, they're having beers, they're eating together. You know, embodiment could literally be uh the Italian model of embodiment, which is just families, food, religion, you know, singing, you know, this is very normal in a lot of uh societies. We're the aberration in in many ways in sort of modernity. So the split of the head from the rest of the body, and this is uh fairly consequential, much more than people realize, in that this is how we uh this is part of our humanity for one. Secondly, it could just be people with stress. You can't just think your way out of stress. You know, cognitive strategies can be helpful, but certainly they're not everything. That's why yoga's taken off so much. You know, there's all yoga all over London now. It's very normalized now, which I didn't think would happen when I was young. Like yoga was just some weird thing my mum did. You know, it wasn't like uh it wasn't honoring my mother a lot today, but she was definitely one of my early teachers. And uh now it's normalized in that way. Meditation and mindfulness are far more normalized. 20 years ago, when I went into a corporation and I said, okay, let's let's try meditation for stress, people looked at me like I was a complete freak. And now they say, Oh, I've got an app for that, I do headspace, oh, my wife teaches yoga, you know, I it's very normal now. So my life has got a lot easier um over the sort of 20, 25 years of doing this. Um yeah, but the the the consequences of disembodiment are far more than people think. Let's let's take morality, for example. I'm a big fan of morality, unlike some of my postmodern friends. Um we tend to think of the angel and the devil on the shoulder, but the conscience is embodied. The conscience isn't just the thoughts, it's the feeling of like, I don't know, I walked past the wholesome healthy Selenian family today, and I just thought, ah, you know, my whole body lit up. But I'm like, I want that. You know, and I looked at my girlfriend, I'm like, I want that. Do you want that? Let's do that. You know, that's an embody, it's not a logical thing. There's no logical reason to have children. You know, maybe if you're in Africa and you need them to survive, but it's but it's uh a cooling of the heart, we could say, right? The heart is embodied. Uh equally, the sense of right and wrong, you know, that's hugely embodied phenomena. So it it relate embodiment relates to how we see the world. You know, when you're in a bad mood, the world looks bad. When you're on holiday and your body's relaxed, everyone seems great. Your relationships are embodied. We don't pick our, like I heard before, if you don't mind me saying you're about to get married, right? Like I doubt I and even though you're a consultant, I doubt you picked your wife on an Excel spreadsheet according to data criteria. No, I'm imagining something just sung in her to you, something resonated. There was a we call that chemistry, right? The kids call it uh vibe. That's what the kids call it these days. That's all embodiment. It's all embodiment. So we actually make the biggest decisions of our lives, like our religion, our partners, or whether to have kids based on embodiment. And if we're not tuned into that body wisdom, then we're more easily hijacked by the forces that exist. And some of those forces definitely do not have our interests at heart.

SPEAKER_00

So what I'm hearing is it sounds like the people who are drawn to you now, there is no longer necessarily a type, but it sounds like people are coming towards you for uh a meaning, really, to understand how to live their lives more fully.

SPEAKER_01

Meaning is a big part. Yeah, sorry, I didn't really answer your question. So a lot of people it's just stress because that's stress just means suffering, right? It's just a rebranding of suffering. So stress is a big one, everyone's stressed. Sometimes it's mental health, they have anxiety issues, for example, where most young people do. It's ridiculous. Um corporate world, it might be leadership. So, you know, if you're disembodied, you're not charismatic. If you take a charismatic leader, I don't know, who have you had on from the right? Uh Tomlinson or uh uh uh Saga, you know, those guys, like there's an embodiment there. There's a there's a physicality to their leadership, even if they're not doing yoga every day. There's some physicality. If if you're just a head on a stick, you're absolutely not a charismatic leader. You know, and this is how we regulate people. It's um, you know, a good aeroplane captain, it's the tone of their voice. It's you know, hello, welcome to British Airways, I'm your captain. You know, that's something they train them in. That's an embodied phenomena. It's not um uh simply what's in their head. So charisma is a big one, and then on the other end of the spectrum is just like hardcore trauma, like the Ukraine team I work with. You know, they need to get in their bodies because they've been they've been smashed out of their bodies, let's say. So that that's what trauma is. It's a disembodied phenomena.

SPEAKER_00

You you brought up some interesting uh points there about some of the guests that I'd had on and the charisma that they have, and uh and that they're not just talking heads on sticks. And actually, some of the people you mentioned, and I'll I'll mention some others from across the political spectrum, is they all have an embodied and uh non-uhabstract life going on outside of what it is they do. So Connor is um is is a very committed Catholic. He also um is rather involved with actual on-the-ground journalism. I know you mentioned um Carl Benjamin, so I'm gonna have a card. I haven't had him on um yet, but he's someone else who gets out, does on-the-ground journalism, grassroots politics, Paul Embury on the and and lifts weights, lift weights, right?

SPEAKER_01

Like a lot of these guys have some kind of a physicality to them. Sports, weights, MMA is fantastic, you know, raw egg nationalist I interviewed. You know, he's got a physicality to him. This is this is visceral. This is what makes someone attractive, both in the sexual sense, but also in the sense of like.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, well, that makes the pair of us. We both we both interviewed raw egg nationalists, and I know your conversation, uh, I'm sure there was a little bit of overlap with the one that I'd had with him, but as you know, he's got a book coming out soon called The Last Men, and it's a it's uh effectively him making the case that the modern world and all of the things that disrupt our endocrine system uh and uh reduce our testosterone levels if it's through um the the water that we drink being um somewhat contaminated by uh the the effluence of the birth control pill, which is putting more estrogen into the water and all these other things. He's basically saying, look, if we're looking at our society and wondering where the men have gone, we've actually got a problem that is driven by biological changes in our environment that's that's causing issues. How how much do you um do you get on board with that? I I it sounds all very convincing to me. And actually, when I look around and I even look at my own my own ARC, I was once a very unphysical person until my mid-20s, and I I certainly noticed changes in in me, both in how I uh navigate my way through the world and otherwise since I've started to do to do lots of physical activity.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean there's uh there's studies on this. I mean, the gym is absolutely a gateway drug to being right wing. Um the the sense of agency you get through it. But I I think it's there's different levels of analysis here, right? So Roygnashlik's mostly looking at the nutrient and the chemical toxin level, which is totally valid. You know, the frog, the frogs are gay as fuck, right? Let's be honest at this point. Um so and we're all the frogs. So we've got to be a bit careful of what we drink and what we eat. And you can get neurotic about that, as some of my friends do, but it's um I think it's well, you know, we're looking for a good meat supply here. You know, it's like what do we eat? How do we eat plastics? You can you can make some changes there. And embodied perspective is a little more psychological. So it says when we work out, yes, we change our chemistry, which is absolutely true. You know, my testosterone is boosted from being in the gym this morning. I, you know, if I'm going to do an interview, I love going to the gym first because it just boosts my uh chemically, it changes me, but it also changes my confidence. Like, I think what what is weightlifting? It's agent, it's agency in its in its most brutal, simple form. It's I can move a thing, I have an impact on the world. And the message we're given totally normally is we're victims, we're passive. Obviously, woke culture really turns that into a religion of victimhood essentially. So that's another way it impacts us. And the Greeks knew this, the samurai knew this. This is not new, it's not Marx's invention. This is a re uh re uh reimagining of the sort of ancient traditions of the gymnasia and of British sports, the Victorians knew this. The samurai built a whole culture around character development. Because the thing is that with the physical, it's the most manifest part of our being, it's the most um obvious literal part of our being. So it's the thing we can do most with. Like I to change your mind is difficult. To change your soul is impossible, to change your spirit. How do I get at that? But we could do a breathwork exercise, we could do exercise, we could do yoga, we could do weightlifting. That stuff's easy. So it it's it's the access point for all the other stuff. Like if I want to change my mental, like mental health, right? This is a mental health crisis. It's not mental. Like nine out of ten cases, not mental at all. Take someone with a supposed mental inverted commerce health condition, get them going to the gym, get them eating right, get them outside with a bit of sunlight, get them sleeping and not on their devices late at night. I guarantee you 90% of the like anxiety disorders will clear up. It's not a chemical imbalance. The chemical imbalance is coming out of the lifestyle factors, the physicalities of the uh what they're eating, how they're sleeping, etc. So that's the first thing. It's not mental health at all. The next thing we need to look at is the cultural toxins. Yeah. This is the state we're in. No, excuse me.

SPEAKER_00

This is a this is a safe space, Mark.

SPEAKER_01

It is. There's no such thing as a safe space. We could have a brain aneurysm in a heart. I tell my students this the other day. I say, look, if I'm coaching you, you're not in a safe space. I'm trying to kill your old self. I want to be in an existentially threatening space. Yeah. Maybe, you know, an ethical space, of course. You know, you shouldn't abuse your students or whatever. But this idea of a safe space is absurd. Like life is danger. You could have a heart. My dad died of a heart attack walking down the street, just bam, dead one day. There's no safe space.

SPEAKER_00

It doesn't exist. Well, I think we should definitely get on to uh to to death in a in a little while because uh that that that looms over all of us in in some ways and has a very well not in every way, but it it has it has a very different impact on on different people depending on their their psyche and their circumstance. But there were some really interesting threads to to pull on there. I I and I I I think the first one we should pull on is that notion you were talking about with the state being in competition with masculinity. And actually, I'd never really thought about this before, but clearly men, if you look at the anthropological record, is the way that they tend to um uh bond with each other is shoulder to shoulder, they engage in coalitional activities, and if you look at all the things that really get men going, whether it's 11 aside football or going down and doing MMA, uh sparring with each other, working out with each other, obviously all of that is about physicality. We know it that it we it is the stronger sex, and so it makes sense to me that if the state, the liberal state, as we've come to understand it, is the Leviathan that's meant to keep all other um groups. In check in some way is that actually it would try to suppress masculinity and I never, right?

SPEAKER_01

At least like Roy Nationalist him about this, and he said, Look, I think we made the same point. We came up with it independently that if the plastics in the water or whatever were making everyone's testosterone go through through the roof, something would be done about it very quickly. Yeah. So it at least even if it's not conspiratorial, it's at least in action. It's in these, at least in action. I mean, we essentially we live in a death cult. So there's a number of aspects to that death cult. But what do I mean by a death cult? I mean, uh it is embracing death on every level. It's embracing ill health. Uh it's suggesting we do things that are definitely unhealthy. The lack of fertility, this should just be like every headline in the newspaper every day. We're dying as a species, right? It's only mass migration which is keeping the UK propped up in that way. And there's this sort of economic case that's continuously pushed for what is an invasion. It is an invasion, that's the right word for it. But what's at the root of that is a self-hatred. There's a spiritual malady of self-hatred. That's part of the death cult as well. Uh, you know, and then we get to like literal elements like abortion, for example. But we are we are ruled uh by a death cult. That's the dominant regime culture. And I think it's we should see ourselves really as an occupied country, right? Like, like if the Nazis were to invade, it's always the moral thing with the Nazis, right? That's always this sort of looking back to this. How would it be worse? How would it be worse? I mean, we're not speaking German, but we are speaking a very bizarre language that was recently invented, diversity, DI, etc. How would it be worse? We we we are invaded, we are unhealthy, we are not I say we, because I still consider myself I still have a British passport, even though I live abroad. And I think the framing of this is just some sort of slight political issue is uh is inappropriate framing. We need a much fiercer framing than that.

SPEAKER_00

I feel like the that framing is starting to push through in some way. So what you've described, I've I've recognised amongst people where there are the English, the British, who say, as much I love about my country, and they talk about the various quirks and the historical artifacts and whatever, but what they don't recognise is that there's this um, I've heard Niall Gooch, who's been on the show before, he's uh he's a journalist, um, side of the desk journalist and a very good one too. And he said it's like this um this fetid toad is squatting atop my my nation and is is sucking the life out of it. And um, and I know for those who who typically have more conservative leanings, small C conservative or right leanings, will recognize that others will think this is this is pure hyperbole, and that's that's up to them. But the the deaf cult idea you're putting forward strong terms, but actually when you look at policy, it's it's uh yeah, you know, we are uh we are trying to push our elderly towards the the grave in assisted suicide abortion. Is it something like 250,000 a year here in the United Kingdom alone?

SPEAKER_01

It's uh absolutely so it's a quarter of a million babies are killed by abortion. We're going the Canadian way of wanting to turn our old people into food chips. I mean, I'm only slightly exaggerating for comical effect, but you know, that's a movement that's in the UK. There's very little native reproduction or support for that. You know, no one seems to think that's a weird thing. What is the pride flag? The pride flag is every group who can't reproduce, right? It's every group who are chemically castrated or just inclined not to reproduce, which they might be lovely people. I've got gay friends, you know, that's a thing. Uh and we that can't be the norm for any any society to reproduce. Yeah? It can't be the norm. And I think continuously pushing the old demons from World War II, and I, you know, there's a reason I sort of brought that up, it's not because I like the Nazis. Of course I don't like the Nazis, you know, I've got way too many Jewish friends to like the Nazis. And um that moral thing of anything is far right that is in any way has about the love of people. So what I found psychologically true for people is that they need to connect to tribe. And any group in Ethiopia or any, you know, the Amazon or an Australia Aboriginal would totally understand this. This is the most normal human thing. We have to have a sense of tribe. It's actually stressful for people to be around people who are not of their tribe, right? Like I live in a foreign country. I understand this from the point of view of an immigrant as well. Like I'm around Slovenian and I like the people and I like the place, and we have a lot of shared values, unlike you know, some migrants. Um, and it's still a sense of like it's a little bit stressful, not quite understanding what's happening. Or on a more subtle level, not quite resonating with people, that little disconnect. You know, I was just at a wedding and that you know, things are a little different. And this is just a little bit different because we're still European, we still have a sort of wider class of people. So I think that sense of connection to tribe has to stop being demonized. It's the most normal, natural, healthy thing on the planet. Every indigenous people on the planet have it. Uh, the other one that needs to stop being demonized is the connection to spirit. Materialism doesn't offer adequate solace for the horrors of the human condition. You know, Buddhists said life is old age disease suffering. This death we're gonna talk about, right? Like, this is just what we're faced with. Like I wake up this morning, I'm like, oh, I'm a middle-aged man, I'm creaky, you know, it's like it's hard to avoid at this point. People die. There are wars, there is diseases, and faced with that, we need more than consumer culture. We absolutely need something good, true, and beautiful. We need something that speaks to the human soul, whether it be traditional religion or, you know, I've helped younger people who find they're more secular to have spiritual experiences, even though they might not be traditionally religious. We need that. That's not a nice to have, that's as essential as oxygen and food. So we need a ecology, a land we're connected to. Again, this idea is to be given a bad name, but it's like blood and soil are connected. It might take my family five generations to connect to Slovenia, where I live now, and really connect to that land. And I'm beginning that process, we can speed that up. You know, I would love immigrants in the UK to be taken out into the British countryside and giving, you know, DME and scouting and really giving a connection to the land. We need a connection to God, we need a connection to land, we need a connection to tribe, and we need a connection to our own physicality. That's what keeps people sane. And any government or any economic system which does not support that is abusive, is harmful, is demonic, I would say, on a spiritual level. So any economic system that just says there's only materialism, all that exists is stuff. Your job is to acquire stuff and then die. People are fungible units that can be moved around between countries. This is absolutely demonic because it um uh it destroys the human soul. It leaves us deracinated, it leaves us mentally ill. This is this is demonstratable. This is not just Mark's opinion.

SPEAKER_00

Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button. If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you are watching or listening to Thinking Class on. You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class. You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at thinking class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox. You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support. Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate. Well, I I think I can I can speak even from personal experience about living a life of materialism and consumerism and all the other things we've spoken about, where you've had your heads turned by temptation and destructive habits. I've be I've been there and I I I remember I remember when it all started to unravel as I engaged with other things like ancient Greek philosophy, which those virtue ethics helped me to start turn my life around in some way, started to see some positive feedback from the efforts I was putting out there, started to back myself, having been an early school leader, picking up a degree later in life, which then turned into learning a language, then turned into a master's, then turned into good jobs. But the thing is, is I knew that even going through and picking up certificates and new jobs wasn't enough. I realized that I'd been cut off from even my own country's history. I'd knew so little about not only my my country, but even my own my own ancestral line. And as I started to learn more and more about those things and started to get rooted, and then a religious mindset ended up being cultivated alongside it, is I became a much fuller human. And every time I deviate from that path of the either the virtue ethics or the religiosity, or I find myself being caught up in just chasing the next job promotion and zipping around in accordance with my outlook calendar, I feel devoid of humanity again. And right, you're right, John.

SPEAKER_01

You're right, you're right. Your moral intuition is correct. All I'm saying is take that, yeah, have the courage to take that moral intuition to its full expression, to its logical conclusion. People feel this. I see the desperation in the eyes of. I was in London on a trip recently. I was in Islington, you know, the heart of the heart of the sort of liberal regime. And the desperation in people's eyes that they were trying to cover up with lines of coke and alcohol and tinder and porn and all the things people try and cover it up with. If they quiet themselves, if they just go for a walk in the woods, man, you don't have to get it. Like go for a walk in the woods and you go, oh yeah, that's all bullshit. That's all covering up. And you actually became human. I would say someone who is disconnected from again, the four things body, community, ecology, spirit, and spirit is the hardest one to define. There's different versions of that. But anyone who's disconnected from those things is sub-human. They are not human. Yeah? There's a dehumanize, deracination leads to dehumanization. The nihilism that leads to the narcissism and the decadence of modernity, that nihilism strips us from our humanity. And maybe that's the point, right? Maybe that's the violence that's being done against us. And as people who have, we have a right to self-defense, I would say. What does that self-defense look like? Well, you know, some of it looks like taking care of yourself, some of it looks like having a family, going to church, going to the gym, and some of it might look like things I can possibly encourage on a podcast that'll be on YouTube. So apparently uh my lawyer told me incitement exists as a thing still. So um, let's just say if someone was punching you in the face, you would have a right to defend yourself from them morally, even if not legally. And we are we are being punched in our soul and our minds on a daily basis by the system we're in.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, well, and I think that probably explains why you find so many people blackpilling as it's referred to uh on the internet. Uh um one thing that I wanted to get into actually, ecology is um is is I again, if anyone who works in the modern world where we are constantly on laptops and all that kind of thing, or we're just in air-conditioned buildings, is you've you talked about walk in the woods. A couple of things I've done in the last few years has been getting out and learning some some bushcraft, quite literally being under under wood cover and being shown how to understand what woods to use for fires and shelter and build all of those things and make your own food and and skin animals and gut them and fillet them, all those kind of things. I'm I'm not good at it, but to actually do it and then spend the night in that shelter um is something which gave me uh a number of things. First of all, a rush like I've never had before as I passed each stage gate. Oh, look, I'm I'm I'm a little bit closer to a bit more comfort, but only for a certain period of time before I had to think about the next thing. And I I don't consider myself to be an anxious or a depressed person, but what I do know as someone who spends a lot of time in his head in the modern world is that in the course of a working day, you definitely feel weariness in your soul. Uh and and and but when you're out and and you're always thinking about lots of things, there's like a thousand different things going on. But once you're out, say covered by trees, thinking about where's the wood for the fire, and lighting the fire, repairing the food, and all of those things, is that it all goes away. Every single bit of it goes away. You know, you're eating some of the things growing on the forest floor, you're preparing fresh food. It's none of that goes away. All of the things that we worry about, the next to-do list, the thing you need to do on your phone, on the app, on the whatever, it's all gone. And it feels, as you just said before, like you're becoming human. And I would argue that um besides all of those points we talked about with religiosity and the rest of it, and how that is humanizing, we need to recognize where we've come from, and that the world that we live in right now, elements of it are so unbelievably counter to our nature that it's no wonder most of us are looking around for answers and help and feeling like victims.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Yeah, so we evolved through a certain context. 99.9% of our ancestors or more were uh Paleolithic, actually, you know, stone stone stone edge. Yeah. Uh so if we're not in the context of physicality, of community and tribe, and that might look like you know, singing, dancing, hugging, and all the things people do, right? Eating together, you know, I'm very much Mediterranean about this. I've got an Italian girlfriend that's just taught me a lot about this part. If we're not in the contact of ecology, and I, you know, for example, little changes, right? Like go for a walk every day. An hour in the morning, an hour at night, you know, in the park if you live in a city. I've deliberately always bought uh got houses by parks, for example, if I live in a city. I've deliberately moved to places where I'd buy a river, for example, or by the coast, you know, ways to walk along the seafront. Even in Deccan and Brighton, I could walk along the seafront and have, you know, if nothing else, you're eco-regulated would be the word. We could think of this in terms of self-regulation, co-regulation, eco-regulation, I made that up, and theoregulation, you know, the this contact with spirit, meaning or profundity, which makes us say. It's like these are the four anchors, the four connections, yeah. Um yeah, and that could like I take my coaching calls outside. I just said to all my coaching clients, hey, we're gonna do the coaching on the phone from now on, and I'm gonna be in the botanic gardens. Okay, that's the deal. If you want to do it on Zoom, it'll cost you double.

unknown

Right?

SPEAKER_01

And then they're all like, cool, we'll do it on the phone. Right? So it's like now we do phone coaching and I sit in the park and I'm, you know, looking at a heron and sitting under a tree and naming the local turtles or whatever while I'm when I'm coaching someone. It's fantastic. So that's a lifestyle change I made. And I'm aware people are in very different situations depending on where they live. But I would say this should be a factor in choosing your home. You know, my house, my house is full of houseplants for a reason. Uh we have a balcony, you know, some of it you can choose, some of it takes time. But yeah, the ecological connection, absolutely true. The same as building the community, letting rid of getting rid of the guilt you have of being English or French or whatever you are, actually embracing your where you come from and your people. Uh, that's not a bad thing. That's a normal, healthy thing. This is psychologically necessary. So uh I've covered this through the route as like being a psychologist, right? Just going, uh, we're talking to the uh my team that I supervise in Ukraine, who they do thousands of hours of therapy for soldiers and civilians and you know, all sorts of people in Ukraine. And we we basically worked out over the last three years. I I was there on the ground, um, I think in week three of the full-scale invasion. I'd been to Ukraine like 20 times before because I had a I was married to a Ukrainian. And we were like, well, what actually keeps people sane under the most extreme conditions? And it's actually exactly the same stuff as keeps people sane working in a job in the city of London, right? It's okay, what does that look like practically? Let's give people something they can use. So you need some kind of a physical practice. You know, for me it's weightlifting. It used to be martial arts. For some people, it's conscious dance, it's kind of a fun hippie one. Uh some kind of something that gets you in your body, right? You need to build community. That's not given to us in modernity. We need to actually establish it in person and online. There's a certain amount of my time each week I spend doing that. Yeah, and that might be just talking to the neighbors, right? It might be really making an effort to go to weddings, to build a men's group. Yeah. Ecologically, I spend three hours a day minimum outside. And I work a 45-hour week office job essentially. I just move my coaching calls outside. I go for a walk in the morning, walk for an evening, sit out in the sun at lunchtime, I get that ecological connection. And then, you know, I try to connect more deeply to the land with things like you're saying of my friend Matt Hill, for example, runs these good survivalist camps and he mixes them with martial arts, and you go out in the woods in the in the in the in the south of England. It's fantastic. I'd recommend Matt if you're in the UK. And then theological connection. I pop into church every day. You know, for me as a sort of postmodern recovered Catholic, I um just go sit in the chapel. And um, my modern mind struggles with some aspects of Catholicism, but I know I feel better when I sit quietly for 10 minutes in church. I used to meditate a lot, I still do, I still have a Buddhist practice to some extent. That's you know, you can be a secular Buddhist. I think there's meditations that fit with Christianity that can be quite helpful. And those things are connected. Like, who doesn't feel closer to God in the woods? Like that's where God spoke to all the prophets, is in the desert, in the mountains, in the forest. You know, when it says wilderness, that just means in the Bible. That just means outside the city. It's just what it means. Wilderness means outside the city. So like these things are connected, and the more I'm in my body, the better my relationship is, the better my, you know, the better sex I have with my partner, the easier it is for me to be in my body, you know, personally. So these things are all connected as well, right? And the nice thing is you get virtuous circles if you just start with one, right? Like buy a dog, right? Just start with, just start with one thing, like do a little bit of yoga. It's like get outside every day, you know, say a prayer for one minute every day. Like I go to 12-step recovery groups, I'm long-term sober, and it's like, you know, they just do the serenity prayer. Very simple, 30 seconds. No one can object to the serenity prayer. It's it's actually the heart of stress management. I teach it at workshops now, it's genius. You know, what you can accept and what you what you need to change. Um little practices, that's all you need. And the key thing for the sort of internet generation is it's not just about listening to podcasts. Like John, I was happy to hear, you know, you've been doing these physical things, and I bet Connor is and other people out there, you know, uh Carl and other people. It's not enough just to sit and get angry on the internet, to listen to podcasts, to watch YouTube videos. It's like you need to do some of these practices. Like, I'm not a particularly smart guy in some ways now. I've was far too alcoholic for that. You know, nowadays I'm not the smartest tool, the sharpest tool in the box, but I think I'm pretty good at helping people develop practices. So that's the thing I I would lean like young men to do, for example, is not just to get angry on the internet, but to actually get in the real world and you know, talk to girls, go to church, lift weights, etc.

SPEAKER_00

We've we've spoken about men fleetingly throughout the conversation, and I I think probably covered off quite a few themes of the the book that you've been writing, but maybe we can we can linger a little bit on why it's important for men to be around other men. Uh this is something I know I uh have uh struggled with over the years, having not been to university in the normal sense, and then ending up out in the world of work, not really being part of sports teams, for example, and so lots of mixed groups, but then every time I find myself amongst men, uh I I know it's it's necessary. You wouldn't want to be around men all of the time, but um what why do you think it's important for men to have exclusively men's spaces? And what should they be doing in them? Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, what should ever be grunting? Um, so let's start from youth, right? Boys learn how to be a man from men. Women cannot teach this. I had several single mothers like basically ask me to take their boys to the gym when I was living in the UK because they were like, Oh, can you help my boy? Can you mentor him? And I'm like, well, it'd be a bit weird to just sit and talk to him. Like, guys don't really like that. You know, men don't need to talk about their feelings, by the way. That's totally overrated. Um, they do need to be mentored by other men. So I would take them to the gym and mentor them there. Um, I think young boys need to be initiated, and that's solely missing from our culture. There are organizations, however, that do that. So that's the first thing. And that only happens between men. That's that's not something women can do no matter how. Yeah, these single moms are great women, they're really, you know, nice people, they're well-intended, but women cannot raise men. Only men can raise men. And in an education system which is so female dominated, that's important. Now, why do male adults need men? Um okay, so first of all, it's the most natural thing in the world. We're we're basically gangs are our natural habitat, right? This is this is why like guys in military, for example, remember their buddies in the army their whole life and they've got these intense relationships with them. Um so first of all, I think just well, that's enough of a reason. The other one is it's really draining to be around women. Like I've I'm in environments where I'm, for example, if I'm teaching coaches. It might be like far more women, 80% women. And it's subtly draining. So there's a way in which we're recharged by it. Yeah. In embodiment terms, if you're heterosexual, and that needs to be the norm for most people for a society to continue, right? There needs to be polarization. So what does that mean? It means you have an embodiment of masculinity, there's an embodiment of femininity. You can say yin and yang to use the Chinese terms if you want to be a slightly more sort of less gendered. That's the term I use. I'm dealing with more left-leaning people, yin and yang. And that gets charged by being with men. And for women, it gets charged by being with women. And then when we come together, there's this beautiful meeting of difference. Whereas, like the modern corporate environment, the men are toning down their masculinity so as not to freak out the women. And if the women have got any ethics, they're toning down their femininity to not arouse the men. And everyone's in this sort of gray sludge in the middle. And, you know, even gay guys polarize. There's a reason, like uh, you know, lesbian couples have to put you in the feb. You know, this is polarization has to happen. I used to work with the gay community in Moscow. They always used to very traumatized, but they used to say, like, look, we have to polarize, you know, this is a this is a thing we need to do. So yeah, I think it's super healthy to have that re-polarizing time or else it's just subtly draining. Um, in terms of what they can do together, I think the key thing is they do something. So I don't like relating. Relating and emotions are disgusting. They're for women and communists and therapists, you know. Like for me, the key thing is men, it could be fixing a car, right? It could be having a war. That's why men bond so well in war. They're doing something that matters to them. Uh, it could be a charity project. You know, I quite like even like the rotary groups and stuff like this, they raise money for charity or whatever. Uh, as long as it's uh it's it's kind of like shoulder to shoulder, as you say, like women often like to relate face to face. Men, that's actually an aggressive or a sexual act. So it's more like me and you side by side, let's go kill that antelope over there. Yeah. So for me, that's as long as they're doing something meaningful, that's the key thing. Like my men's group is actually a marketing group. I run a closed marketing group for guys who are um, you know, certain size business and do a certain kind of activity. Everyone comes because they want to make more money, but they stay because they go, oh my god, this is so nice to be around men and to bond and to have that you know feeling of not being alone. And men have been isolated to a point of they've been demonized and isolated to a point of they're killing themselves in record numbers. Like people have been shitting on young men forever, and but increasingly in modern culture, they're either told to be feminine or they're told they're bad if they're masculine. It's one of those two things. Like, like the people in the mainstream in the in the regime uh propaganda class, what's their vision of being a man? They don't have one, right? Because it's it's it's literally it's it's essentially masculinised women and feminized men who are in that regime propaganda class. And what they're pushing is just be less masculine. You know, that's why nothing's being done about the chemical pollutants, because it absolutely aligns with that. Yeah. And then of course leads to this weird swing back, which is the sort of hyper masculine but super materialistic, like Andrew Tates of the world, who are pushing essentially materialism. It's like, yeah, make money, shag women, be famous. And it's like, okay, that's that's still the demonic message of materialism, but now it's gone hyper-masculine in a way which is just not healthy. I mean, you know, the man's a pornographer, like irrespective of the fact that he's definitely being taken down for political reasons, he's also clearly a bad person, right? So it's it's it's uh it's lacking ethical virtue. So that's the extremes you get of either femininity, demasculinized, kind of pathetic, kind of um shortage wankers, or on the other side of things, the you know, hyper-masculized guy on the internet who's showing off his chest and shouting. And it's like, come on, real masculinity, muscular, Christian masculinity is also compassionate, it's also wise, but it has to be boundary. I think the key thing that defines healthy psychology is boundaries. It's a key the key thing. It's the key thing also that defines what it is to be conservative. It doesn't mean you're racist, it doesn't mean you're hypernationalist, it means you understand boundaries. You understand that you wouldn't let anyone in your house, you understand that your country does need a wall. That's why the wall was such an archetypal symbolic symbol for Trump. It's not because the real wall was the thing. Most people fly into the US, but symbolically it was perfect because it was a boundary. Yeah. And um standards, boundaries, excellence, these are the key things of masculinity.

SPEAKER_00

Lots of fascinating threads to pull on there, but I appreciate we're coming up towards time. But a couple of things as a footnote, uh the suicide numbers of men is are remarkable and not in a positive way. I mean, they are uh that they are getting bigger and bigger each year. We we rarely talk about it. And when we do, it is typically through the lens of almost like a feminine HR manager who then we need to talk about the feelings.

SPEAKER_01

It's not they don't need to talk about the fact their life is crap. They need better lives. Young men need a way to make money which is dignified and meaningful. You know, doing Excel spreadsheets for Clive and HR is not that. Okay, they need to have a love and a family. They can't get laid, let alone love, because the way the apps have destroyed the dating market. Like that's an absolute anathema. The people that have done that should be held more criminally responsible. That's absolutely harmful to men that they can't get a date and they're blamed if, you know, if they try and talk to a girl, that's harassment. So they absolutely can't do it the old school way either. Uh, and they don't have spirituality. So it's like, yeah, they don't have meaning, they don't have money, they don't have a partner, they don't have kids, they can't afford to buy a house. Economics are a part of this too. You know, we do need an intelligent leftist analysis. I hate to say it, but the left should be doing their job of analyzing things according to, like, you know, why does mass migration happen? Well, from the right, it's because we don't have a sense of a spiritual tribe. You know, from the left, it's equally to say that um mass migration is being done for profit. It keeps house prices high and wages low. So we do need an economic left analysis as well as a cultural right analysis. But young men are just their lives are crap. So of course they're they're depressed. You know, add to that the effects of pornography, add that to the effects of the physicality they're in, the cultural climate, all of these factors. There's no one factor. It's like, yeah, they don't need to talk about that. They need a better life.

SPEAKER_00

Well, it sounds like you're dropping breadcrumbs for people to follow to be able to live uh a more human existence and in counter to the culture. Uh, and Mark, you've explained and described your story to this point so far and a few things that have turned your head along the way. But one question I ask all of my guests who come on the show is what you've changed your mind on during the course of your life. Perhaps it was an absolute, perhaps it was something you didn't expect to change your mind on. And what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, many things. So I guess the importance of community, realizing that spiritual practice without that is just narcissism. Understanding, I think it was traveling and being in other cultures, you know, like the Italians don't hate being Italian. They love being Italian. They'll tell you about it all day, you know, they love it. And equally my Ethiopian friends or other cultures, I've Japanese friends, other cultures I've spent a lot of time in. That was one. Uh, one recently is a bit vulnerable, actually, is the importance of boundaries and sexuality. You know, for a long time I treated sexuality as sport, as just some, yeah, no, I'm consent conscious and I'm using protection, so it's fine. And, you know, I was raised fairly liberal around that. Just, hey, you know, just be consent conscious and you know, use use condoms. And I think I've really recently realized like if sexuality isn't in the container of love and commitment of some kind, it might not need to be religious marriage, but some kind of love and uh love and commitment and boundaries around that, it's disastrous. It's spiritually toxic, it hurts men and women, it's no good for anyone. And you know, I came to that conclusion late, I would say. I was unboundried around that in my past, and it wasn't good. It wasn't good for me, wasn't good for other people. And um, yeah, a bit late in life, maybe I've come to that conclusion that we need some uh that every culture in human history that's put boundaries around sexuality maybe wasn't crazy. Who would have thought?

SPEAKER_00

Well, it got us this far, I suppose. Uh Mark, you are quite active on the internet. You're certainly publishing more things. Where can people find you and what can we expect from you next?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, um, so I've had enough of helping the world. So next I'm just gonna buy a house in the countryside and raise a family and get some dogs and kids. Um, but what I've done in the past that people might like, we have a podcast, Feral Philosophy, uh, for podcast listeners around these issues. Uh, there is a book, How to Become Human. So this book is for young men. Uh women are not allowed to read it. Women are not allowed to read it. So it's just for young men. I'm not sure if that's legal, but that's our stance, clearly. So if people uh look up How to Become Human by Mark, just use my first name, How to Become Human by Mark, they'll find that book. I think that's the main one. There's all sorts of other trainings and free resources online that I do as well. I'm on all, you know, Instagram and X and all the North.

SPEAKER_00

Well, we'll include links in the show notes. And Mark, before you go, you've mentioned Slovenia a couple of times. And uh you you've said you no longer live in Britain. I I I know some of my in my my regular viewers will be interested to know the reasons why, and maybe you've already told us implicitly, but why did you leave Britain?

SPEAKER_01

Don't come to me. It's horrible, you wouldn't like it. Uh yeah, I don't want to raise the house prices anymore. Um I I left Britain and I was very lucky. My my granddad was an Irish volunteer in World War II, and so I had an Irish passport. So I I'm I've considered myself privileged in a way many people aren't. And I still have some guilt around leaving the UK because it's like have I abandoned uh you know country that's raised me, even if it's not my genetics, I have Irish heritage. I still have a grief of leaving the UK because it's still home for me, and I know it will take a long time, maybe generations, for this to become home. The decision I made really was for my future children. I was talking to my girlfriend, we're clear we're gonna have children together, and I said to her, our children, if we raise them in the UK, will probably be mentally ill. They might try and trans them. I mean, essentially the UK is a zombie country or a trans country. It's not really a country anymore, it's an economic zone, right? It's an economic zone with a uh and a ruling globalist elite to rule over uh a native population as a surf class, essentially, and then importing their, you know, another class to make sure they don't get out of hand. And I said, I don't want to raise children in a place like that. I don't want to raise like all of my friends' children had mental health problems, and I was helping a lot of them, you know, taking them to the gym, talking to them, et cetera. And I said, I don't want my children to have mental health problems, I don't want them to be trans. And I also it's really important to me to speak freely, really important. And I started to notice I was censoring myself in what I said on my podcast and YouTube. I started to notice I was not saying things that are true. And we need to speak the truth. I love the documentary on Chernobyl. I've been to that part of Ukraine. If we don't speak the truth, sooner or later reality comes to bite us. And also the the truth is how we commune with God. Like it's a spiritual necessity to speak the truth. And just for me, I'm I'm just kind of like an Irish rebel at heart, and I need to speak the truth. And I realize in the UK, and I still have this when I go to Heathrow, if I visit my family, I'm like, am I gonna get arrested today? And I went, you know what? Fuck this. I will not live in a police state. I will not live in a police state uh of an invaded country ruled by a regime who hates me. I would not live in that country. Uh, maybe I could do a bit more good from abroad because I feel a bit freer to speak the truth here.

SPEAKER_00

Well, it's something that I I I personally have grappled with as to whether to stick around, I'm going to you, but I recognize all of the things that you say, and as someone who records conversations and puts them online, and I think does so quite reasonably, and if I do touch topics that you wouldn't otherwise really want to touch within the mainstream, is um I'm I'm trying my best to continue to speak the truth in such a way that um it doesn't feel like I'm constraining my conscience, but I I know that feeling of always looking over your shoulder.

SPEAKER_01

Uh yeah, yeah. I've I've noticed myself that John, you're doing great, man. Like who you're hosting and what you're saying, and you're doing great. I just want to encourage you. I think it's really you're probably more tactful than I am. I'm not a very tactful person. So people with tact probably are um you know more skilled than me. But I just just want to say it's great what you're doing and you know, giving voices to these people. And there is some risk for that now. And and what I would say is it's probably less risk. Uh, it's a risk worth taking. You know, masculinity is almost defined by courage, and courage demands we take some risk to ourselves, right? Courage demands that. So let's let's speak the truth, even if we're shaking a little bit inside.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Mark, it's been an absolute pleasure. I hope we get to meet again. I do have very good friends in Slovenia, and I go not irregularly. So next time I'm there, I will I'll hit you up and hopefully we can meet up.

SPEAKER_01

John, come have a take your partner maybe for a honeymoon or a romantic date here. You can get an easy flight. Long weekend is nice here. Go to Lake Bled, go to the Capitol. You know, I walk around here at nighttime, and I don't I can walk in any housing estate at midnight and not feel threatened. It's this is what a normal country feels like. It's got 95% ethnic linguistic homogeneity. People feel have a sense of togetherness here. They don't hate strangers. They're still welcoming to me, right? Because they see I bring something to the country. I'm not parasiting the country. But this is what a normal country feels like. If you go to Czechia, Slovakia here, Poland. British people should go to these countries and just go, oh shit, this is what we've lost.

SPEAKER_00

I think people feel it even if they don't, even if they don't allow themselves to say it because they're worried about hitting the hot button topics and what that might mean for their reputation. Is that I I think people feel it. They go to a Budapest and they go, This place is so safe. I love it here. It's so wonderful, so free and easy. Well, well, I'm glad you're enjoying things out there. It is a wonderful country, and let's let's embody our relationship next time round. Uh Mark, thanks so much for coming on. Everyone, check out Mark's stuff and keep doing what you're doing. Appreciate you. Thanks, John. Real pleasure. Thank you. To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters. Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond. Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you. I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.

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John Gillam

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